Dragon Age Forum News (Dec. 25, 04)

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

David Gaider, Designer

New race in Dragon Age is feline?
Nope, no race of cat people anywhere to be found.

No furries, either. Or LARPers, for that matter.

Some people might think the race is vaguely lizard-like, I suppose, but the race in no way corresponds to a "humanoid version" of any Earth creature. Nor is it a translation of any creature that exists inside the D&D mythos.

The fourth race, if you are interested, is defined far more by its religion and culture than by its physiology. Indeed, the religion came first in its conceptualization, not "hey let's make a race based on X".

Romances
Well, DA is going to have romantic storylines... and very likely more than just one for either sex, as well, so an argument based on the idea that DA just won't have time to build something so deep and complex is (I'm afraid) a bit beside the point.

We will be trying to achieve something a little more complex than we've tried for in the past, but let's not get carried away. It's not the point of the game, nor does it need to be.

As for how a gay romance might play out, from my personal perspective I don't think I'd want to use a struggle with personal sexuality as the only obstacle. Such an issue is largely internal and, I suspect, wouldn't herald much fun in the long term. That's probably more to do with the kind of thing I would be interested in writing as opposed to what might work, however.

More: That's very true. There was no closure or sense of "friendship" for Carth and Bastila with members of the same sex. You got to follow their romance track up until the point before it became a relationship... so you got the tension without the resolution.

I'm pretty excited about working on actual paths with the NPC that involve comraderie and friendship instead of solely a relationship... and allowing you to opt out of a romance while still maintaining a friendship, should you so choose. It's the next logical evolution to how these things are done.

If you wonder whether or not this can be done, let me just say that usually I get one, maybe two weeks to write a particular character. Tops. And that's for the ones with a romance. With DA we're scheduled for a month per (although that includes edits and re-writes). Still, that's not bad and hopefully will allow for something a bit more considered (if the schedule doesn't end up changing, which it often does... still, that's the plan).

More: Well, I know everyone likes to put something like romances under a microscope, but keep in mind that there's so much other writing that has to be done. How much of BG2's 1.2 million words of writing pertained to the romances? Not that much, I'd suspect.

Having 2 or 3 years sounds like it'd be a lot to write a game in. Considering that more than half of that must be put aside for preparation and design (never mind testing) and you've got a pretty tight timeline in which to spread a lot of writing and dialogue amongst a small group of people. I don't get paid to sit on my *** and consider for weeks on end how I might be able to make a romance more complex and meaningful, after all. I mean... yes, I have to do that (and we are) but it has to be done in a timely fashion with a real plan and it has to be written yesterday. That's just the way it is. Because next week I have to move on to the next plot or nothing is going to get done.

The time we've been allotted in DA for writing is, compared to other games I've worked on in the past, positively luxurious. And I am not kidding.

(If you want a comparison, I wrote three of the NWN OC NPC's inside of six days. They were six very loooong days, mind you, but six days nevertheless. Call me a hack if you like, but I have to try to fit quality inside a whooooole lot of quantity. )

Dragon Age Languages
I didn't realize Beesechurger was Wolf, initially. I should have, mind you... he's a very strange man. The work he's done on the DA languages, both spoken and written, is excellent as you will all eventually find out.

More: Well, I meant strange in the best possible way. You ever meet someone who's so much smarter than you you expect that, at any moment, they'll give you an indulgent smile and pat you on the head and send you on your way? Yeah, like that.

More:

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Could it be his last name?

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No, that's his first name, actually. (It's not an unknown name... you've heard of Wolf Blitzer, surely.)

If he chooses to give you his last name, that's up to him. Though I imagine you'll find out eventually anyway... well, whatever.

Conversation tokens
In DA, we are only using tokens in the PC responses (which are not voiced). We do refer occasionally to race and gender and such in the regular NPC dialogue, but each time we do so it requires a completely seperate line (and we do it much more often than you'd figure, considering that's the case).

Whether or not we'll have the normal tokens as we had in NWN is hard to say. If they're easy to put in, then I imagine so if someone has the time to add them... otherwise no, as we certainly have no need for them.

jade empire on pc
Unarmed combat is not really a planned feature for DA. Not initially, anyway.

Give Us Memorable NPC's

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<snip> memorble experiences even if they lasted all of a minute of the screen time

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A telling line, there. I think the trick is not how well-developed the NPC's were but how much you believed in the world they were a part of. Do that and, apparently, some people will read things in and fill in the blanks even when their dialogue and story aren't extensive. Or such is my observation based on what's being said here.

And I would have to agree that the party NPC's we used in the OC weren't boring in and of themselves (which I think was proved in HotU) but rather it was the rather mechanical way in which they were implemented. (Which, believe me, we are not doing again anytime soon.)

Conversation tokens

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So, will the PC's name be used in conversations in Dragon Age at all?

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Like KotOR, no... none of the NPC's will be saying the player's name. And here we won't even have the benefit of aliens who use "alien speak" and who therefore can use your name if they wish. At first I thought it was going to be difficult, but because of the use of certain titles in the story it hasn't been that bad.

We've never used the player's name on VO'd lines. With the entire game VO'd, that becomes problematic. I don't think having the player's name appear on screen but not spoken would be better... not when the entire game is VO'd. Do you?

Give us memorable villains!

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The point is (grab your notebooks Bioware) that we need more memorable villains.

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Thanks for the tip. Normally we try to make our villains forgettable, and it's good to be certain that that's not the way to go.

How is DA going to handle character models & clothing?
It's probably worth mentioning that the tech involved since we created NWN initially has advanced light years. Replaceable body parts (like the head/helmet thing) is hardly necessary unless you've no need for an alternative.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Ability to play as an insane serial killer/cannibal
I don't think there are plans for any hunger or food simulation type features. DA is not a MMORPG.

Toolset and Functionality
Hey,

Conversations build from scripting is not likely, mainly because the writers at BioWare are using the next generation of our dialog editor which allows them to do everything they need to do to create the story for Dragon Age. Creating a second dialog system that nobody at BioWare would use is not likely to happen, since there are better ways to spent development resources

I also would not expect a random NPC generator. While something like this could maybe done from scripting by a clever person (and even that's not guaranteed), DA's focus is story based gaming with memorable NPCs, and random NPCs are as far from this goal as it could get, so I doubt that there will be a lot resources dedicated to something like a random NPC generator.